Yearning for whatever adults don't want you to have, while tormented by visions of being able to grab it with no need to say please or thank you, is the essence of the teenage state. How the Light Gets In by MJ Hyland (Walker/ Canongate £6.99) is one of the best evocations of that state I have read, and cries out for the young adult readership that this co-publication is designed to attract.

Lou, whisked away from her working-class Australian roots by a programme for gifted teenagers, yearns for privacy and sleep as well as the creature comforts of the orderly, well-heeled American small town where she is spending a school year. Her high-achieving host family, with their fake intimacy and unrealistic expectations of Lou's assimilation into their preppy culture, understand her no better than her own family, who ridicule her for loving books. When she turns to her familiar props of cigarettes and alcohol, retribution is swift and extreme (even taking into account that she must be a very annoying house guest).

Clem and Frankie in Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet (Walker £7.99) know all about yearning too. They are one of many couples of a certain generation who have John F Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro to thank for their first sexual experience: if the Cuban missile crisis and the imminent end of the world in 1962 did not provide sufficient excuse to Go All the Way, what would?

Separated by a Berlin Wall of class differences, without the benefit of mobile phones, this Romeo and Juliet of rural Norfolk win hearts and minds. They are only part of Peet's sweeping narrative of a half-century of social change, in which the superpowers are revealed as just as inept and vulnerable as the rest of us. Particularly touching is the progress of Clem's parents' relationship from first love to disappointment, as tortuous and draining as their son's love for Frankie is short and sweet.

Life: An Exploded Diagram has a good chance of next year's Carnegie Medal if There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff (Puffin £12.99) does not get there first. I look forward to Rosoff's novels because they are all so different, and this story of the world in the hands of a feckless and hormone-driven male has the spine-tingling weirdness of Just in Case, her existing Carnegie winner, which also explored the mind of an obsessive teenage boy. In the new novel, the boy in question is God, who created the world in a manner that suggests he was on Facebook with a hangover at the time, and has let it get in a worse state ever since.

Milicent's Book by Charlotte Moore (Catnip £6.99) is a tender, sometimes heartbreaking tale of an extended family afflicted by loss and madness. It documents the adolescence of Moore's grandfather's stepmother as endured in the 1880s, long before teenagers were invented.

Newly orphaned Milicent is resigned to being a mere inlet on the island named after her controlling older sister Mabel (their uncle is an Arctic explorer) but when Mabel forms a romantic attachment, Milicent's shaky security is threatened. Although the more bohemian of her relatives widen her horizons, Milicent's diary threatens to self-ignite with frustration whenever it is not being drowned in sorrow. Fortunately, the niece of the founder of Girton College, Cambridge cannot be kept down for long.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (Walker £12.99) is from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer in 2007, and explores the importance of rage in processing grief. Conor, whose mother is dying of cancer, has been exiled by his own and others' terror and denial into a kingdom of uneasy distances and sour silences. The tree monster who visits Conor is the antithesis of Dickens's three Ghosts of Christmas, telling his disturbing tales not to make Conor a better person, but seemingly to lance a giant boil full of fury and bitterness. In a beautifully produced edition with brooding and chaotic illustrations by Jim Kay, this is a short but searing story of opposites: a queen who can be both a good witch and a bad witch, a prince who can be a murderer and a saviour, a boy who wants his mother to live while also longing for her to die.

Lia's Guide to Winning the Lottery by Keren David (Frances Lincoln £6.99) is a good example of sharp, sassy fiction about urban girls who have made an art form of shopping and self-absorption, but are proved to be not completely shallow. Lia does her best to be outrageous by calling her parents Graham and Paula (their names are Sarah and Ben) and would be distraught to learn that she has a standard set of challenges: 435 Facebook friends but a few troublesome real ones, a fog around career plans, a boy who fails to notice her, not enough money for the jacket she craves. The message of the story (that an £8m lottery win can solve only some of Lia's problems) contains few surprises but is told with excellent comic timing. The details of how she obtained the winning ticket make a killer punchline.